The Colossus

 I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.

It's worse than a barnyard.


Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.

I am none the wiser.


Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull-plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.


A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us.
 O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.

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